Professor Michael Sharpe

Cheshire

Cheshire

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Professor stops researching ME/CFS after intimidation (M. Sharpe)

'You are a danger to our recovery'. Few researchers get as much criticism as he: the British professor Michael Sharpe. He tried to make people with ME / CFS (chronic fatigue) better, but eventually opted for a different field of research. 'There are a lot of problems to investigate and it just brings too many difficulties.' We interviewed the Brit extensively for our research Chronic Tired.
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https://demonitor.kro-ncrv.nl/artikelen/hoogleraar-stopt-met-onderzoek-naar-mecvs-na-intimidaties
Google translate: https://translate.google.com/transl...,15700149,15700186,15700191,15700201,15700213

Thanks to @Grigor for his link on twitter:
 
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includes a very unhelpful quote from CDC's E. Unger:

Elizabeth Unger, responsible for these changes at the CDC, emailed us: "Feedback from the ME / CFS patients and their loved ones showed that these terms can be confusing to the public and sometimes misinterpreted by doctors who are not familiar with ME / CVS. "
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would be good to have the fullt text of her e-mail.

more on the series on this thread: https://www.s4me.info/threads/dutch-journalist-asks-about-pwmes-objection-to-cbt-get.5521/

(my last last post on this topic while having a forum break, I promise):asleep:
 
I've only read half ot the translated version, not a lot of tolerance this morning but I have a few comments on it so far.

Good riddance, if he shuts up.
Psychology is NOT science, psychologists are not scientists.
I suspected that video would come back to bite us.

I suspect it might make more sense, and suffer from less obvious hostility and irrationality, if google offered a Dutch to Martian translation option.
 
OMG - I can't believe, that at this point, we still have journalists churning out such mindless propaganda:

Last summer the British parliament debated the treatment of ME / CFS patients. Sharpe sent the parliamentarians a letter in advance with a point-to-point defense of the substantive criticism of the patients. If you want to know more about this criticism and the reaction of Michael Sharpe, read the letter (in English) at the bottom of this article.
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To write the above the journalist would have needed to go through the criticisms of the PACE trial, and then check to see that all the substantive points had been addressed by Sharpe. We can be confident that wasn't done, as we know that Sharpe fails to address the key substantive criticisms made by patients.

To suggest that people who want to know more about criticism of the PACE trial should read Sharpe's misrepresentations is pretty special.

It's a bit annoying that the icons of PACE criticisms they use are things I've pointed out problems with, like the ME Associations silly 'It's real! It's physical! It's ME!' t-shirts, or Myhil's PACE video self-promotion. These are not more important things than, for example, the false justifications given by the PACE researchers for making absurd changes to the SF36-PF criteria for recovery, seemingly post-hoc and without TSC approval. The De Monitor journalists seemed to want a nice simple story that would appeal to people's prejudices, rather than one that would require them to actually engage with the evidence.
 
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Of course this, and any further research following on from it, will definitely have nothing to do with ME....

A European Research Agenda for Somatic Symptom Disorders, Bodily Distress Disorders, and Functional Disorders: Results of an Estimate-Talk-Estimate Delphi Expert Study, Published May 2018

Authors: Christina M. van der Feltz-Cornelis, Iman Elfeddali, Ursula Werneke, Ulrik F. Malt, Omer Van den Bergh, Rainer Schaefert, Willem J. Kop, Antonio Lobo, Michael Sharpe, Wolfgang Söllner, and Bernd Löwe

Highlighted here,
https://s4me.info/threads/updates-o...tion-and-terminology-systems.3912/#post-77912, alternatively open access at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00151/full
 
PS: I'd already said this about the series:

Esther12 said:
I'm not surprised that journalists who were new to the topic would find appealing a patient who was new to the topic and seemed 'open minded'. Unfortunately, this sort of guide is unlikely to be able to dig into all of the details of the evidence in the way that is needed.

I get the impression that in this coverage we're again seeing the whole psychological vs physical thing works against patients - it's a pointless distraction, and part of a simplistic narrative that many journalists seem to find appealing, but just leads to people rambling on about the need to develop a sophisticated understanding of how mind and body interact.

Journalists are generally not going to be interested in understanding the complicated legal and financial reasons that classing a health problem as 'psychological' can be problematic. They're more likely to want to virtue signal over their own attitudes toward mental health problems. Whenever debates about ME/CFS are presented in the terms of whether ME/CFS is physical/mental/whatever it seems to make it more difficult for us to get our substantial and legitimate concerns listened to and understood.
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https://www.s4me.info/threads/dutch...-pwmes-objection-to-cbt-get.5521/#post-100732

It's kind of amazing how all their work seems to indicate that they're aware that they're too lazy to take the time to really dig into the details and make an informed judgement about the research like PACE, but that they nonetheless think it's acceptable to make a series about the controversies surrounding the treatment of ME/CFS. I do not understand that mentality.
 
He's also getting himself involved with other vulnerable patient groups
Unidimensional scales for fears of cancer recurrence and their psychometric properties: the FCR4 and FCR7



    • G. M. Humphris,
    • E. Watson,
    • M. Sharpe and
    • G. Ozakinci

Background
The assessment of fear of recurrence (FCR) is crucial for understanding an important psychological state in patients diagnosed and treated for cancer. The study aim was to determine psychometric details of a seven question self-report scale (FCR7) and a short form (FCR4) based upon items already used in various extensive measures of FCR.

Methods
Two consecutive samples of patients (breast and colorectal) were recruited from a single specialist cancer centre. The survey instrument contained the FCR7 items, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), and demographic details. Clinical information was obtained from patient hospital records. Statistical analyses were performed using classical test and item response theory approaches, to demonstrate unidimensional factor structure and testing key parameters. Construct validity was inspected through nomological and theoretical prediction.

Results
Internal consistency was demonstrated by alpha coefficients (FCR4: 0.93 and FCR7: 0.92). Both scales (FCR7 & FCR4) were associated with the HADs subscales as predicted. Patients who experienced chemotherapy, minor aches/pains, thought avoidance of cancer and high cancer risk belief were more fearful. Detailed inspection of item responses profile provided some support for measurement properties of scales.

Conclusion
The internal consistency, and pattern of key associations and discriminability indices provided positive psychometric evidence for these scales. The brief measures of FCR may be considered for audit, screening or routine use in clinical service and research investigations.
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Open access at https://hqlo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12955-018-0850-x

ETA: His ResearchGate profile is here, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Sharpe2, if anybody else wants to view his towering scientific achievements. ;)
 
A shame there does not seem to be comments facility for the original Durch article. Here, badly worded, are some of the points I would want to raise with the journalist and Prof Sharpe (also posted as a comment to Anil's blog post):

So sad that Sharpe is allowed continue to make these disingenuous comments.

This continued repetition of nasty irrational patients bullying the poor scientists was deliberately developed to devalue the criticisms by patient groups and patient scientists, and completely ignores the failure of PACE researchers to respond to valid criticism. It also ignores the large number of respected academics now raising the same points. The freedom of information tribunal in the UK, a legal court, found that the PACE investigators were unable to produce any evidence for this so called harrasment.

To suggest that David Tuller's robust language and repeated raising of the same issues amounts to bullying also overlooks the fact that his initial attempts to raise this have been ignored. It also overlooks that a growing number of respected academics, the majority of patient organisation from around the world and a number of British MPs are consigning his letters. It is only bullying if Tuller is saying things that are untrue or inaccurate and that the recipients of his letters/emails have actually responded in a reasonable and timely way.

There is growing evidence that exercise is contra indicated in ME, and a number of surveys indicate a significant number of patients suffer ill effects from GET, such that it is likely that if it was a drug it would have already been withdrawn. So accusations that giving GET to children is a form of medically sanction child abuse would seem totally reasonable. To fail to address these findings and assert that such accusations also are bullying to researchers is complete ethical cop out.

His assertion that patients object to PACE because we are afraid of the stigma of a psychological diagnosis is without evidence other than the assertion of the PACE appologists. Personally I would much rather have a psychological condition than have ME because then there are relevant treatments and a possibility of recovery.

He continues to assert that the use of CBT has no implications in relation to the causation of the condition, but conveniently skirts over the fact that the PACE version of CBT is based on the belief that ME is caused by false cognitions and aims to teach the patient that their understanding of their condition is deluded. This is not what most readers understand by CBT and to hide this is to seek to deliberately mislead. Personally I have had very productive CBT to help me accept the restrictions placed on me by my long term disabling condition, but unreservedly reject the PACE distortion of CBT.

He continues also to mis represent the many criticisms of PACE and fails to adequately respond to them. To say that patients prefer subjective evaluations in research is very convenient when the studies of CBT and GET using objective measures either found null results or failed to report them. However whatever the preference of experimental subjects this has no relevance to the fact that unblinded trials relying on subjective outcomes are uninterpretable, particularly when the interventions employed are designed to change how subjects regard their condition.

His assertion that decades of biomedical research have not identified a physiological mechanism is also disingenuous as it deliberately ignores the thousands of studies indicating biological abnormalities in people with the condition. We do not know the causes of many medical conditions including some dementias, but no one (rational) asserts that exercise and psychotherapy will 'cure' (existing) dementia.

Has he not considered the possibility that researchers are increasingly wary about engaging in psychological research into ME because the methodologies used are deeply flawed?

One can only hope that these rather desperate denials by Sharpe will alert a wider audience to the problems and encourage them to look more closely at what has been described as the most significant medical scandal of this century.
 
Andy said:
He's also getting himself involved with other vulnerable patient groups
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I find it worrying that someone who was happy using the CFQ is designing a scale (i assume with a random set of questions). Sharpe has no notion of what is necessary for a scale if he did he wouldn't have used the CFQ and certainly wouldn't have switched scoring schemes with the claim it 'gives more accuracy' with no evidence.

Of course maybe we should continue to pick holes in his research output even though it is not ME related
 
More like since his ME/CFS research got exposed as total crap he can't get any other sap to pay him more money to come up with more of the same. He will not be missed. Doubt he will stay out properly though.
 
Doesn't adding comments to things on social media just indicate 'interest' and hence mean that they come to be seen by more people? Could be worth having people post links to useful information, but it's probably a case where the fewer comments the better.
 
Ouch, what a read, adding one more one-sided and partial article in defense of PACE and Sharpe. I wonder: Where are the good investigative journalism and important questions? Why can’t journalists dig deep and properly? It would require investing resources and more than a superficial approach, but that seems to be an eternal obstacle. Really wish media/journalists understood that you can’t intuitively grasp the history and the essence of ME - do your homework and have another try.

One has to wonder - what is the purpose of this, - is it being a microphone stand for Mr. Sharpe? To quote Wessley. Nothing to see here, move along.
 
Peter said:
Ouch, what a read, adding one more one-sided and partial article in defense of PACE and Sharpe. I wonder: Where are the good investigative journalism and important questions? Why can’t journalists dig deep and properly? It would require investing resources and more than a superficial approach, but that seems to be an eternal obstacle. Really wish media/journalists understood that you can’t intuitively grasp the history and the essence of ME - do your homework and have another try.

One has to wonder - what is the purpose of this, - is it being a microphone stand for Mr. Sharpe? To quote Wessley. Nothing to see here, move along.
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There are probably lots of PR people posing as journalists selling their industry out nowadays. That's how the SMC has got uncritical articles into the press over all these years.

Its just laughable that this same media machine is telling us its the internet etc whom are the perpetrators of fake news alongside the government and the establishment desperate to be the big brother of "real news."
 
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